Can I be picked with a private account?
Short version: you won't have any chance to be picked with a private account (at the time of the draw).
All our services rely on public data provided by the Twitter API (as well as other pickers), so we need to understand how Twitter is delivering these data.
When your Twitter account is private, your public profile isn't available publicly but only for your followers as well as your tweets, likes, retweets and everything you made on Twitter, until you get unsuspended. It's the same behavior for the data provided by the Twitter API: they will not share any tweet, like, retweet or information about your account.
We have 2 ways to handle contests on Pickaw: by importing them or creating them.
When a contest is imported, we're loading all the retweets when the contest organizer decide to do so. If your account is protected at the time of the load of retweets, your retweet will not be returned by the Twitter API, and you will not be in the contest entries, so you'll not be be able to be picked.
When a contest is created, we're using a different method but the result is the same: we're saving each retweet when it is made in realtime. If you're retweeting when you're not private, you will have an entry in our database. But if you're private at the time of the draw and you're picked: you'll be automatically rejected by the check "Content doesn't exist anymore." because we're verifying if the retweet still exists at this time, and as it is a protected retweet we can't see, it will fail.
For the same reasons, you won't have any chance to be picked if you're suspended.
This is the same behavior for all pickers, any private account will not have any chance to be picked and win because Twitter doesn't return data of a private account.
Going a little deeper in the explanations
All our services rely on public data provided by the Twitter API (as well as other pickers), so we need to understand how Twitter is delivering these data.
When your Twitter account is private, your public profile isn't available publicly but only for your followers as well as your tweets, likes, retweets and everything you made on Twitter, until you get unsuspended. It's the same behavior for the data provided by the Twitter API: they will not share any tweet, like, retweet or information about your account.
We have 2 ways to handle contests on Pickaw: by importing them or creating them.
When a contest is imported, we're loading all the retweets when the contest organizer decide to do so. If your account is protected at the time of the load of retweets, your retweet will not be returned by the Twitter API, and you will not be in the contest entries, so you'll not be be able to be picked.
When a contest is created, we're using a different method but the result is the same: we're saving each retweet when it is made in realtime. If you're retweeting when you're not private, you will have an entry in our database. But if you're private at the time of the draw and you're picked: you'll be automatically rejected by the check "Content doesn't exist anymore." because we're verifying if the retweet still exists at this time, and as it is a protected retweet we can't see, it will fail.
For the same reasons, you won't have any chance to be picked if you're suspended.
This is the same behavior for all pickers, any private account will not have any chance to be picked and win because Twitter doesn't return data of a private account.
Updated on: 04/03/2022
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